Ruby 1.9.3 was released on Sunday, which contains some noteworthy improvements including increased performance with file loading, more environment variables to tune the garbage collector, a change in the license to dual Ruby + 2-clause BSD, a better strategy for the GIL, test unit supports parellel testing, 4 new encodings, improvements to the openssl library, a new io/console library, and a few other things. If you're running Rails with 1.9.2, you may want to upgrade ASAP to get the bootup speed improvements.

If you maintain a gem and need to maintain compatibility with older gem dependencies testing against said dependencies can be a pain, and usually involves testing against multiple Gemfiles. Enter Appraisal, which allows you to write an Appraisal file which contains all the different gem versions you want to test against.

If your gem needs some configuration, like an API key, name, password, or server API endpoints, you may want to check out Grant Ammon's ConfigFun library. ConfigFun gives you a DSL which makes writing out these configuration opens real simple.

If you love cucumber and also love command line applications, you'll love Aruba. Aruba is a Cucumber extension which makes it easy to test command line applications in any language. Hector Castro wrote up a nice tutorial to show you how.

Kane Baccigalupi wrote in to let us know about his Mockumentary test stubbing library. It has two modes, the first called Mockery which gets used with ActiveRecord and creates dummy objects and stubbs out all the methods with fake data, and the other called Mocksimile which allows you to run tests which depend on ActiveRecord ... WITHOUT ActiveRecord / Rails. Sounds fast!

This weekend Jesse Storimer released Spin, a Ruby gem to help your tests execute faster by preloading your Rails application environment and forking a new thread whenever it's asked to run a test. It basically relys on Rails's ability to auto load classes when their called, so it's always up to date.

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Manage your Heroku app over SMS, run a local git server with ghoul, building awesome command line apps in Ruby, controlling URLs with Domainatrix, faster rspec tests, no more bundle exec'ing, and the open source release of Hubot!